I write in the morning, seated at Starbucks, enveloped in the buzz of townspeople conversing around me. Most linger here for as long as it takes the barista to fill their drink order. Some like myself stay for a while. I recognize many and know some, the regulars. At the corner of State…
We Americans are “stuck in a ditch”, “out of gas”, “can’t find the keys.” Use any metaphor that comes to mind to describe an impasse. The automobile, “the invention” of the 20th century, is the indispensable means of transportation. How many idioms do we have to express the helpless feeling of being unable to…
Thursday. More mulch to spread, the last of ten yards. After more rain, the plants are “happy.” Happiness is about well-being is it not? I am compulsive about using the camera at this time of year. Each springtime is new, as if there has never been one just like this one. I do what…
Wednesday midweek, I reel at the news of another mass shooting. This time the slaughter was visited upon children (19 children and 2 adults) at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. And the reason? Why there was no reason, in the classical definition of reason. A few of the causes: a society awash in…
How to get started this morning. Last night’s sleep was troubled. Dreams, all unpleasant, but those have come infrequently lately. I realize that each of us has a young vulnerable child within. What child does not have a nightmare from time to time? It’s a big world and there are monsters about! But morning…
The Cannes Film Festival is in progress, Tue, May 17 – Sat, May 28. The New York Times reported on the festival in the email dispatch that I received this morning. I was captivated by the quote used in a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Perhaps the Russian war to obliterate Ukraine is the…
It is a Sunday morning. A glorious day, sunlight, all vegetation shimmers after the inch or so of rain that fell yesterday. A squirrel aspires to “carve” a habitation from an old log in the middle of our woodpile, — to give birth to it’s babies. Yesterday the squirrel peered at me from the…
Saturday morning and Starbucks is abuzz. Yesterday afternoon we attended an open house to celebrate the graduation of my wife’s brother’s son’s daughter from high school. The graduate was radiant as she greeted well wishers just inside the foyer of the great room. We were not sure who would be present at the event. …
Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after…
Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is…
